More than 410,000 Russians have died as a result of the full-scale war against Ukraine or its consequences by the end of August 2026, according to the hacker groups Silent Crow and Cyber Partisans BY. They said they had gained access to databases of Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service – Rosstat.
The two groups published differing estimates. According to Cyber Partisans BY, the number of deaths is 393,881. This figure includes records in which the cause of death is listed as military actions or their consequences. Silent Crow cites a broader estimate of 450,100 people.
What the estimate of 450,100 people includes
The higher figure includes not only deaths directly related to combat. Silent Crow added nearly 15,000 non-combat deaths among military personnel, including those who died from illness, in road accidents or as a result of suicide. The figure also includes 575 cases classified as “terrorist attacks”.
The hackers claim to have analysed death records that use codes from the International Classification of Diseases, as well as textual descriptions of deaths during military operations. The broader estimate also includes people registered in Russia but who died in occupied territories or in Ukraine when the cause of death was not specified.
Rosstat confirmed the attack but denied a data leak
Rosstat confirmed that it had been the target of coordinated cyberattacks between 29 October and 1 November. However, the Russian agency denied that databases or protected information had been exfiltrated. The hackers said they had downloaded around 23 terabytes of data, including material on Russian military losses, but this claim has not been confirmed by the Russian authorities.
Meduza reported that it had obtained the material published by the hackers together with Mediazona and was checking it. “We are trying not only to rule out the possibility that the data was artificially falsified, but also to answer the question of how complete it is,” Meduza said.
The data has not yet been independently confirmed
Meduza notes that the two estimates are close in scale to other studies, but their accuracy cannot yet be established. This is because medical certificates do not always state the actual cause of death, while missing military personnel may be declared dead with a significant delay.
The public list maintained by Mediazona and the Russian-language edition of the BBC contains around 286,000 individually confirmed deaths, but is incomplete, especially for recent months. A separate joint study by Meduza and Mediazona, based on data from Russia’s inheritance case registry, estimated the number of those killed at around 350,000 by the end of 2025.
A review of data from Bloomberg, published by The Straits Times, found nearly 392,700 death certificates in which the war was explicitly indicated through codes or terms such as “military operation”, “shelling” or “drones”. The publication noted that this figure is also likely lower than the actual number, since some deaths are registered with a delay, while others may be recorded under a different cause.
Sources: meduza.io, themoscowtimes.com, straitstimes.com